The Historical Backdrop

Abstract

The emergence of a legal and political mandate for European technology policies in the 1980s was a product of both worrying competitive trends and the general reinvigoration of European integration. However, the actual design of new policies was much influenced by early experiments in research and technological collaboration in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these experiments either failed or succeeded only in the long term. Still, many valuable — if often quite painful — lessons were learned from them.